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I wanted to keep a diary of this crazy moment in time where my little family has found themselves with nothing but each other and the home we have built together.
And so I find myself with my very own blog, just a collection of a few photos, my childrens antics and my musings. |
Saturday 31st December 2022 The end of the year weighs heavy on my mind and in my heart. For me this year has been one of loss. It has been unexpected and painful at each new step. I have had years before that I have been glad to see the end of and ready for a fresh new beginning but this doesn't feel like a fresh start. I'm not ready to let go of the ghosts this year holds. Grief hangs over me hitting me in times and ways that I'm never prepared for. Grief for my beautiful cousin, a person who has been a constant friend in my life right from my birth. Grief for her children who were the whole earth to her who should never have to grow without her there. Girls who are on my mind day and night while she visits me in my dreams and talks to me about them. Grief for my dad who lost his brother this year, my cousin's who lost their dad, my nanny who lost her son. Grief for my awful dog who was the absolute bain of my life, her warm body and velvet soft ears and reassuring weight on my lap. Grief for the baby who should have been born in the warmth of the summer but who sadly chose not to stay. Grief for my beautiful daughter who wrote a letter to a favourite character telling them how hard life is in her house. Grief for her happy childhood that feels like it's slipped away. Grief for myself knowing the key role I have in her hardship. Grief for multiple other people and the battles they have had to fight, the losses they have suffered, the pain they have had to bear. To say goodbye to this year feels like a fresh goodbye to those who won't be joining us in the next. It feels like a final end to the dreams that never came to fruition. Early this year I spoke of restarting my blog and talking about some of the journey I've been on with my mental health. But wave after wave of heartbreak has hit me and my family and as I clung to those I love and got my head down and just kept on going it was just another thing that fell by the wayside. Today I needed to write some of that down. I'm not entirely sure what it is I'm here to say but it is in some way cathartic to be writing. I guess if you're here and you've made it this far then I just want to say hold on. For all the pain we have weathered and continue to feel there have been so many achievements, so many happy moments, dreams beginning to come to life. If all you can do at midnight tonight is shed a tear, tuck yourself away from the world and hope to hibernate until the pain is over then please know you're not alone. I too will be clinging to the embers of the year frightened that I'll forget what has been left behind. Tomorrow will be just another new day. Lift your head a little and take in the daylight amongst the storm. Hold tight to each other and know that even the darkest nights end and the sun will rise again.
Friday 29th January 2021
Today I am on annual leave. I booked it just a couple of weeks ago just to use it up before the end of the year. I already had my childcare arrangements in place and up until Tuesday of this week I was fairly certain I would have to cancel the leave however the gods were looking after me and here I am, home alone in the quiet and solitude. After my last post I am finally here sitting on my sofa and catching up on the TV I wanted to watch. It feels like all I have done since Christmas is work and try to hold my family and home together in the in between. Even on the days when I have found myself home without the kids for a few hours I have not been able to do anything other than prepare to be at work or catch up from being at work. With 3 small children there is a hell of a lot of organisation, washing, tidying and a whole host of other things that need to be done. Today is different. I am not at work this weekend, the kids are not at school, we are mid lockdown so there is nowhere to be for the next 2 days. This means that today is mine. The washing can wait. The tidying can wait. I am here alone in the middle of a pigsty of a house completely happy watching This Is Us and doing nothing. Except that this solitude I crave is fraught with emotion. I miss my children. I feel like a terrible mother for being short tempered with them. For literally tagging in my husband when he walks through the door and going and shutting myself off from them for 20 minutes. I am wandering around our empty house looking at tiny items of clothing, toys that are constantly in the way, little beds that are never ever made and crying my heart out because this life as I know it is so temporary. Before long they will all be at school all day and this solitude will be commonplace. In a heartbeat I will be begging them for a cuddle instead of begging them to get off of me for just 5 minutes. I have never been happier in my life than I am right now. I have never been so proud of anything as I am of my beautiful, unique and hilarious children. I have never been so at peace with my own body as I am now in the knowledge that my incredible body grew and housed and fed these incredible beings. My relationship with my husband has gone from strength to strength as we’ve navigated these ridiculously hard years together. And as long as some of the days and weeks are it feels like in just a few short moments all of this will be gone and I will once again be sat in a quiet empty home. One of my favourite sayings is “the nights are long but the years are short”. My god does that feel true today. And then, just like that, its already 4pm and Jamie is texting me from work asking if he’s getting the children and I’m texting him back saying “yes but not just yet!” Oh the contradiction of motherhood. |
Saturday 9th January
Self-care and the working mum. Self-care when you are a working mother is pretty much non-existent. Self-care for a working mother in the midst of national lockdown and a global pandemic is nigh on impossible. Yesterday I was rostered for a night shift. My way of preparing in order to stay up for the night is to have a really good lie in and in order to do this all of my children go into school/nursery meaning I have the house to myself until 1pm. Usually I would have a couple of things planned for my morning home alone and this week was no different. The plan was to get some sleep, get up and put some washing on, have a tidy up and hoover around, have a nice bath and maybe watch some rubbishy chick flick before getting the kids. I have been craving this little bit of me time all week particularly being able to sit on the sofa in the quiet and watch a bit of TV. However, after a long week of overtime to try and cover the gaps at work paired with children that are full of energy and mischief even at 2am, all I managed to do yesterday was sleep. I had been up with the baby for several long hours during the night (as is a common occurrence) so once the house fell quiet at around 8.30 I fell back into such a deep sleep that I didn’t wake up again until gone 12. By this point it was a case of rushing out of bed, downing a cup of tea and running about to sort the chores before collecting the kids. Now I don’t want to complain because obviously I feel much better for it and I’m lucky that I was able to sleep, something that many parents never get opportunity to catch up on. However it seems that the extent of my self-care these days is simply a couple of hours catch up of a weeks missed sleep. Recently I have been having dreams where I am mostly trying to sleep. I dreamt of a day out at Longleat where I was trying to curl up on the floor to go to sleep. I dreamt of a weekend away with friends that I entirely missed out on due to sleeping through it. I am so tired that attempting to catch up on sleep is infiltrating my dreams. You know that exhaustion has hit a new level when a few minutes submerged under the water during the 15-minute bath you managed to grab feels like a spa day. Earlier in the week I was working 12 hour day shifts and another colleague was on 12 hour nights. When they came to take over from me I asked if they had gotten much sleep and the answer was 4 hours. I was very genuine in my response to them and my heart went out to them for how tired they must have been. Having thought about it since I have realised that I had been at work 3 days in a row having only had that much sleep myself. Why don’t I look at myself with the same pity and care? Instead I go home after a long day and I go through the kids school work with them, sit and talk to them, read bed time stories, sort their clothes for the following day, put washing on, hang washing out, pack washing away. The list of things that I complete during my “time off” is endless. And all this week I have been thanking the heavens that this time round there is no home schooling to add to the list. Thank goodness I can take a break from my household and go to work. Thank goodness all of my children are still at nursery and school. When the timetables for home schooling appeared on Google classroom on Tuesday afternoon it made me shudder. To all the parents out there desperately attempting to home school their children you have my upmost respect. To those that are trying to home school and work and/or look after other children I literally don’t know how you are doing this. And to everyone else, if a friend or family member tells you how exhausted they are, please take the time to listen to them. Make them feel heard. There will be little you can do to help them but its amazing what an understanding ear can do to make them feel slightly better. I feel like I am at breaking point and when you look at my reality I have it much easier than many others. Send a little bit of care this weekend to the people you know because there will be many of them out there that simply don’t have the time to care for themselves any more. |
Sunday 3rd January
A very Covid Christmas and a happy new tier. Its been a while but its time to dust off the keyboard and treat you all to a fresh dose of my opinion! Its been a manic old time lately. Personally I’ve been working as many hours as I can cope with whilst battling 3 fierce children and when I have had a treat of some “time off” I’ve spent it wracked with anxiety and stress over ensuring my family have a picture perfect Christmas which incidentally probably doesn’t include me swearing and scowling at Jamie for buying cheap bath bombs and therefore destroying the magic of Christmas in one 5 minute trip to poundland. Christmas is a funny old time. My memories of Christmas as a child include hiding under a table with my cousins drinking “wine” (Shloer!), the exact shape and size of the Christmas lights that hung in the tree at the top of my road, squeezing into the corner of my grandparents very small front room whilst 20 of my cousins also tried to cram in there and that year that my mum tried to make us eat melon as a starter instead of letting us eat bread sauce out of the bowl with a spoon! So what is it with the punishing panic of trying to make sure I’ve bought exactly the right present, that my children have made lifelong memories, that everything is perfect? I could easily declare that I’m not doing it to myself next year but you know as well as I do that its utter bullshit and I absolutely will. For us this year there were bits of Christmas that were just the same but also big gaping holes where our normal Christmas time activities would be. Our annual Christmas trip to Centre Parcs was cancelled as Lockdown-Lite was announced in November. With it our trip to Longleat also failed to happen. We would normally spend the run up to Christmas seeing lots of friends and family, getting together to eat food and exchange presents. Jamie would ordinarily be gigging throughout December and of course on NYE and in lieu of ever seeing in the New Year together we always have a party on new years day where we get out all of the remaining Christmas food and have a good old drink with our friends. Not this year though. On the flip side I did get to have a nice dinner with Jamie and a drunken midnight kiss this new year! |
Wednesday 2nd September
So here it is; September. Up until today I haven’t spent too much time thinking about school. Its not that I don’t care or that I’m purposely avoiding the thought but simply that my brains best defence mechanism is and always has been to ignore a situation until its upon me. I do it when I’m going on holiday – I absolutely hate flying but I don’t think twice about it until literally the moment I buckle my seatbelt on the plane and then my whole body will suddenly go cold with fear. And here I am buckling my seatbelt. I don’t even know what the worry is about. I have faith in the statistics regarding Covid and children. I am confident in the procedures and plans that are in place at the school and nursery. I know that for many different reasons my children need to return to school and will thrive once they are there. But today I’ve had moments where I’ve struggled to catch my breath. A sudden realisation that my hands are shaking. A brief second where I could burst into tears. My mind has raced with 100 different thoughts none of which I can actually catch. And at the same time I’m so flipping relieved to have some time to myself! I’ll open the curtains in the morning and when I come back to the living room 10 minutes later they’ll still be open as opposed to being shut by Violet who is insisting that she’s at the cinema whilst watching How to Train your Dragon for the 300th time. I can pack the washing away without the sinking feeling of fear at the quietness and what mischief it must mean. I can go for a wee without wondering if my kids are smearing my expensive face cream across my pillows or painting their cheeks with my mascara. I won’t be followed around the house by Iris asking “Can I have a banana?” “Can we go on a dog walk?” “Can I have some toast?” “When will daddy be home?” “Is it lunchtime yet?” “Will daddy be home in a minute?” “Can I have a snack?” “Can I ride my bike by the garages?” “How long til daddys home?”
Jamie happens to have the day off tomorrow so we could actually go for a coffee or maybe even lunch! Either way its safe to say that tomorrow marks the end of the most intense 6 months of our lives. |
Friday 14th August
Some days I feel like I’m absolutely smashing it and other days I’m drowning. The last couple of days I have been drowning. It feels as though I can’t achieve the most basic daily chores. This week I’ve been tired. I have struggled to get up in the mornings and when I do get up I can’t actually manage anything meaning that I’m often only sorting breakfast out for the kids at 10am. I find myself spooning porridge into the baby wondering if the neighbours know how shit I am and how badly they might be judging me. Twice this week I’ve made arrangements to meet friends and been nearly an hour late despite my best efforts to be on time. I am already well known for being late but sometimes it is beyond a joke. I feel like the most appalling person when I’m so late all the time. This also leads to a much deeper anxiety about September and how on earth I am going to manage getting 3 children to various places and myself to work. Currently I can’t manage to get 10 minutes up the road by mid morning and I have been determinedly ignoring emails from work all week. Tonight Jamie went out so I had grand plans of watching a million things on TV none of which I can remember the name of, sorting out a big pile of nappies that need to be dealt with, painting a bedside table and replying to emails. I also thought I’d write a blog post. Its now gone 11pm and all I’ve done this evening is play a crap game on my phone. I’m still contemplating painting the bedside table just so that I can go to bed feeling like I’ve achieved something. Fingers crossed that I can go back to feeling like I’m smashing it again next week. |
Wednesday 5th August
Today was tough. It was our final Baby Sensory at home session and it ended with many tears. When lockdown began in March I never thought that it would be the last Sensory session we did. It makes my heart hurt to know that Arlo will never go back. Today felt like it marked something significant. It was as though the magnitude of the last few months suddenly hit home. I feel like we’ve been living in a little bubble waiting for things to return to normal and today I realised it wouldn’t happen. There will be no return. Time has moved forwards despite it feeling like it had frozen for a bit. There are a few more weeks of summer and once September comes this part will draw to a close. Just yesterday I said to Jamie that I felt like lockdown had never really happened, as though it was some sort of dream that is slowly fading. And then days like today drive the reality of it home again. |
Friday 24th July
It’s been more than 2 months since I wrote a blog post and I feel pretty sad about that. There was no real reason for me stopping simply that I am blimmin tired and there aren’t enough hours in the day! I always write in the evening and evenings tend to go one of two ways, either we’re super organised and everything goes to plan and the kids are in bed and washing up done by 8pm in which case I just want to sit and enjoy the quiet or its utter chaos and the girls are still hurling themselves around their bedroom like it’s the wall of death at 9.30pm, Arlo is still crawling around the living room throwing everything within reach across the floor, the dog is whining for a walk and there’s 3 days worth of washing up piled around our very small kitchen making it totally inaccessible. There is no in between it is always one extreme to the other and honestly its usually the latter. Add to that the fact that Jamie hogs the laptop and if I do get my hands on it then I should be doing all the admin that comes with the end of maternity leave and getting kids booked into nursery and after school club it means that writing a blog falls to the bottom of the priority list. So why now? Well its been on my mind for a couple of weeks and today I find myself restricted to my bed after putting my back out yesterday so here I am! And now I find myself preparing to move into September when there will be no choice at all in the matter. Violet will be returning to school. Iris and Arlo will be packed up and sent to nursery. I will be going back to work. In the back of my head I can’t help but wonder what we are supposed to do should there be the second wave that is predicted. |
LOCKDOWN |
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